Dan -- Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself from
my old backup, I'd lose my last year with him. I'd lose _his_ last year.
"Let's table that, doc. I hear what you're saying, but there're
complications. I guess I'll take the mood-suppressants for now."
He gave me a cold look. "I'll give you a scrip, then. I could've done
that without coming out here. Please don't call me anymore."
I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't understand it until he
was gone and I told Dan what had happened.
"Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of doctors as highly trained
professionals -- all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long
internships, anatomy drills... Truth is, the average doc today gets more
training in bedside manner than bioscience. 'Doctor' Pete is a
technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with the
kind of knowledge you're looking for is working as a historical
researcher, not a doctor.
"But that's not the illusion. The doc is supposed to be the authority on
medical matters, even though he's only got one trick: restore from
backup. You're reminding Pete of that, and he's not happy to have it
happen."
#
I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myself on
the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk Around the
World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown Discovery Island,
and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the evenings and it was like
old times, running down the pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and
life in general, sitting on my porch with a sweating pitcher of
lemonade.
On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a
museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the Bitchun
Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in a
package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume,
like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at
the American Adventure.
Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to
participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less
efficiently than I once may've. I took it downstairs the next morning
and drove to the Magic Kingdom's castmember lot.
At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary's
parking lot, my runabout was gone. A quick check with the handheld
revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low enough that someone had just
gotten inside and driven away, realizing that they could make more
popular use of it than I could.
With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key
through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied _bzzz_ and lit up,
"Please see the front desk." My room had been reassigned, too. I had the
short end of the Whuffie stick.
At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail platform,
but the other people on the car were none too friendly to me, and no one
offered me an inch more personal space than was necessary. I had hit
bottom.
#
I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my name
tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of my fellow
castmembers in the utilidors.
I used the handheld to page Dan. "Hey there," he said, brightly. I could
tell instantly that I was being humored.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree."
In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged some
Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd never come
down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They were drawing
from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and from people who'd
read the popular accounts of their struggle against the forces of petty
jealousy and sabotage -- i.e., me.
I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed into the
heavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the Square.
I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the giant,
lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for me, and
patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped, waiting for him
to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me this morning -- I
could feel it hovering like storm clouds.
He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he stood
and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't rope-drop yet, and there
weren't any guests in the Park, which was all for the better, given what
was coming next.
"Have you taken a look at Debra's Whuffie lately?" he asked, finally, as
we stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding.
I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm. "Don't
bother," he said, morosely. "Suffice it to say, Debra's gang is number
one with a bullet. Ever since word got out about what happened to the
Hall, they've been stacking it deep. They can do just about anything,
Jules, and get away with it."
My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars. "So, what is
it they've done, Dan?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
Dan didn't have to respond, because at that moment, Tim emerged from the
Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a thoughtful
expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin and came over.
"Hey guys!" he said.
"Hi, Tim," Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
"Pretty exciting stuff, huh?" he said.
"I haven't told him yet," Dan said, with forced lightness. "Why don't
you run it down?"
"Well, it's pretty radical, I have to admit. We've learned some stuff
from the Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted
to capture some of the historical character of the ghost story."
I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm. "Really?"
he asked innocently. "How do you plan on doing that?"
"Well, we're keeping the telepresence robots -- that's a honey of an
idea, Julius -- but we're giving each one an uplink so that it can
flash-bake. We've got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together
a series of narratives about the lives of each ghost: how they met their
tragic ends, what they've done since, you know.
"The way we've storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ride
pretty much the way they do now, walking through the preshow and then
getting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here's the big
change: we _slow it all down_. We trade off throughput for intensity,
make it more of a premium product.
"So you're a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you're being
chased by these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they're really
scary -- I've got Suneep's concept artists going back to the drawing
board, hitting basic research on stuff that'll just scare the guests
silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on you -- wham! Flash-
bake! You get its whole grisly story in three seconds, across your
frontal lobe. By the time you've left, you've had ten or more ghost-
contacts, and the next time you come back, it's all new ghosts with all
new stories. The way that the Hall's drawing 'em, we're bound to be a
hit." He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly
proud of himself.
When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly
decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for
Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their
drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a
cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the "themed"
areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen,
then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX),
then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern
age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones
and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute -- compelling and
inspirational, even -- but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone,
once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to
resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of
their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia.
And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way through the
Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake.
"Tim," I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. "I thought you said that
you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't be trying
to take it away from us. Didn't you say that?"
Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood drained from his
face. "But we're not taking it away!" he said. "You _invited_ us to
help."